Photo Finish

As you waited in supermarket checkout lines with your hotdogs and chips this past Memorial Day weekend, you could have picked up the Globe and found out how Frank Gifford was banned from his bedroom by Kathie Lee; you could have studied J. Lo's barely clad backside; you could even have seen accused wife-killer Robert Blake posing with some of his favorite firearms.

From the Star, you could have learned that "JFK Jr. & wife died with unborn child," that Bo Derek was haunted by the ghost of her husband and that "The Cad of Madison County," author Robert Waller, left his wife for a younger woman.

But you were not going to read anything in the National Enquirer, even though its previous edition had featured a Colorado-centric story headlined "15-year Anniversary of Photo that Cost Gary Hart the White House" -- a photo published in the Enquirer, of course. "Go ahead, follow me," Hart, a two-term senator from Colorado and the leading Democratic candidate in the 1988 presidential race, had told reporters asking about rumors of his womanizing. "You'll be bored." But they weren't, and when the Enquirer published a picture of Hart posing with a lapful of Donna Rice on a Miami cruise boat fortuitously named the Monkey Business, Hart's campaign was sunk. In its May 28 issue, the Enquirer referred to him as a "low-key international lawyer based in Denver"; Rice, meanwhile, is a stepmother of two who crusades against Internet pornography.

Although that issue reprised an ugly chapter in Colorado history, supermarkets didn't ban its sale. But just a week later, they deemed photographs of the dead Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris too gruesome for local consumption and took the tabloid off the shelves.

This in the same week that Denver Mayor Wellington Webb announced he's looking into publishing photos of people arrested for soliciting prostitutes. If his plan goes through -- and in these budget-strapped days, even thinking of publishing "john ads" in Denver's dailies is ludicrous -- newspapers sold in supermarkets around town could include pictures of men simply charged with, and not convicted of, a crime. And the crime of trying to buy a $25 blow job pales beside the horrific immensity of what Harris and Klebold did that day at Columbine.

Unlike those alleged johns, there's no way Harris and Klebold could be innocent; there's no denying the outcome of their actions -- fifteen dead, including the gunmen themselves. And seeing the killers as they ended their rampage -- not forever frozen in high-school yearbook photos that make them look no more dangerous than Eddie Haskell, or captured on that cafeteria tape as they stalked their fellow students, ninja-cool -- does a lot to show the grim, grisly reality. The Enquirer published only photos showing the dead killers, not their victims; that decision was so right that the tabloid could have skipped the tenuous "Was it suicide?" story, as well as the sanctimonious justification of the photos' publication by pastor Lou Sheldon.

Even so, the Enquirer's explanation was a lot easier to accept than the response from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office -- the very department from which those photos were leaked. As word had spread that the Enquirer was looking for pictures that other media outlets, including Westword, already had access to, sheriff's deputies started calling around, asking reporters for their sources; they refused to give them up. And since they'd failed to cooperate with Jeffco's investigation, those media outlets were at least partly to blame for the Enquirer's publication of the photos, a Jeffco spokeswoman said last week.

So far, though, Jeffco's investigations have done little to inspire the media's confidence, much less cooperation.

This isn't the first time law-enforcement authorities have blamed the messenger, and it won't be the last. In early January 1996, the Globe published photographs of JonBenét Ramsey taken in the coroner's office -- and Boulder residents called for a boycott of any businesses selling the evil tabloids. (In retrospect, their energy would have been better spent calling for a full investigation of the murder.) At one point, even Jeffco got dragged into the wreckage, indicting both a Globe reporter/editor and a Boulder attorney for attempting to buy a copy of the JonBenét ransom note from a handwriting expert hired by the Ramsey team. That case dragged on for years before the attorney, Tom Miller, finally got his day in court -- and was quickly acquitted by a Jeffco jury.

You can't help but feel that Jeffco would like to be able to hold someone responsible for something connected with Columbine -- and if that means filing charges against an Enquirer reporter and the person who leaked/sold the photos to the tabloid, so much the better; after all, the legal research is already done.

Three years after the killings at Columbine, we're ready to see the ugly truth. Those photographs, like all of the documents connected with Columbine, have long belonged in the public domain. It is our horror to share. And confronting the unedited enormity of Columbine -- even in a checkout line -- is no more obscene than our supermarket obsession with celebrity.

On Memorial Day, we should remember.

Rally Round the Flag, Boys

On May 10, Bob Rowan -- better known as the "Dildo Bandito" on TV, radio and in the newspapers -- finally stopped waving the flag long enough to plead no contest to second-degree criminal tampering in Boulder County Court. Although his liberation of 21 ceramic penises from a Boulder Public Library battered-women's art show last November had gained him kudos around the country and an award from a local Republican women's group, his abject surrender went unnoticed outside of the town where he's lived almost two decades.

"I want it to go away," Rowan said in explaining his plea. "It's been hard for me and my wife."

Not so hard, though, that he couldn't spend much of the past six months pushing his act as one of pure patriotism.

As Rowan pilfered the penises from the library's exhibit hall, where they were part of "Hanging 'em Out to Dry," a piece created by Susanne Walker, he replaced them with a note announcing that "El Dildo Bandito was here" and an American flag; the library's failure to hang a grandiose Old Glory had been the focus of much discussion in preceding weeks. And when Rowan called a local radio station later that day to confess that he was El Dildo Bandito, he described his act as a patriotic duty.

After some debate -- this happened in Boulder, after all, and everyone from the artist to the American Civil Liberties Union had to be consulted -- Rowan was charged with second-degree criminal tampering. But he was also offered a deal: a deferred judgment that would wipe his record clean if he stayed out of trouble for a prescribed period of time ("The Peter Principle," February 28). Rowan refused to take it. "I just don't believe that the plea deal was right," he said. "I feel like the city is trying to sweep this thing under the rug. I'd still end up with a criminal record for a year."

Instead, he took his story and his fight to the Web (www.theamericanpatriotsfoundation.com). In January, he announced that he was setting up a charity, the American Patriots Foundation, that would sell El Bandido memorabilia (the "Dildo" was dropped to make the name more palatable to the general public, and somewhere along the way, a "d" replaced a "t") and donate the proceeds to our men in the military. In the meantime, Rowan himself was striving for folk-hero status, celebrated on Web sites (one of them his own) and in song (ditto). "I'd never realized how much patriotism there is across the country," he explained.

But in the past few months, Rowan's cause lost momentum -- and the willing ear of the national media. And so earlier this month, he finally agreed to a one-month deferred sentence, during which time he must stay away from both the artist and the library.

While his Web site still proudly flies the flag, the Dildo Bandito himself has gone limp.

Last Friday, a far sadder saga reached its conclusion -- until the case is appealed, at least. Denver District Judge Michael Mullins sentenced James Hall to life in prison for the killing of John Bray, the bicyclist he shot to death right outside the Westword office two years ago ("Fire Away," May 11, 2000).

In what was billed as the city's first example of fatal "road rage," Hall, who was driving a pickup, had taken off after the 32-year-old Bray when the bicyclist, who was pedaling home from a temporary job, swerved ahead of him. Cutting Bray off in the 900 block of Broadway, Hall forced him to the side of the road, got out of the truck, pulled a gun from behind the front seat and shot Bray in the chest. As Bray went down, Hall drove off.

In March, a jury quickly found Hall guilty of first-degree murder, dismissing his attorney's claims that Hall, a veteran of three tours in Vietnam, had been suffering from acute post-traumatic stress disorder. Good move: If Hall's flashbacks were as bad as the attorney portrayed, he should never have been behind the wheel of a pickup -- a dangerous-enough vehicle in the never-ending flow of light-beating, lane-switching, horn-honking traffic on Broadway.

And he should never have had access to the .25-caliber semiautomatic he took out of that truck and used to shoot an unarmed bicyclist in the chest.

Those who witnessed the crime will have their own flashbacks for years to come.

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